Pricing seems reasonable considering what the device is capable of over the ipad. And don't forget, devs will jump on this at the opportunity to have a tablet that fits into their exiting ecosystem. Reply

If they want to drive market adoption, the price is stupidly high. Windows 8's chances of success just got a lot worse.

Seriously, for $200 more (at most) you can get a ThinkPad Tablet 2--with a keyboard--that can run any x86 app. And that machine isn't exactly screamingly fast with it's Atom processor; they're all overpriced for what you get.Reply

I don't know - I think the first few weeks will go a long way for deciding the success of these products. This reminds me a bit of the Zune - I was hoping to have a lower priced alternative to the iPod. I was disappointed to see them matching Apple prices, and my response was to just buy an iPod (which still works great after 7 years). These tablets need to start selling well from the beginning. The original iPad took a while to get going in sales, but it was a new market. That isn't the case now. Reply

"Pricing seems reasonable considering what the device is capable of over the ipad.".

How so ?. There are Office document readers on iPad. The only slight advantage is Office version where creation/modification of content is possible on RT. Not that people would want to do that often. Mostly reading from the tablet and short email responses.Pricing is a killer here. It is $200 too expensive and users will do the comparison and stay away from Surface RT. A grand fail, just see the number of order estimates by month end.

Remember, Oct 23 with iPad Mini is going to decimate this product launch!.Reply

The iPad has better graphics, a far better screen and a very healthy ecosystem. The Surface has a better case, a cool cover and the internals of the $250 Nexus 7.

I have a hotmail account so I get office home and student for free in any web browser.

The kind of people who would be happy with Windows RT are the same kind of people who would be happy with any tablet. Sell if for $300, win the tablet war and make a ton of profit. Or sell it for $600, stall a bit and cover your R&D.Reply

Yet you forget that the iPad runs a old and outdated OS called iOS. iOS is nothing more then a ugly wall of apps with nothing going for it. I have yet to a decent web browser on iOS that can stand up to the web browsers on Android or even windows 8 which to me has the best web browser options of them all. 90% of the time people spend on tablets are while using the web browser so having something that can't play half the youtube videos or forced into viewing mobile versions of sites sucks pretty hard. Also games on ipads arnt vary good so all that GPU power does nothing, Come back when steam games are on the ipad and we'll talk. iPad is old news now and until the ipad get a improved OS its nothing more then a large ipod touch.

Windows RT is for the future and people who get them now have to understand that. The X86 side will be the one that will help the RT side grow. In a years time windows RT will be booming with apps. Would be nice to see a Atom surface though, Atom in its current state is already faster then ARM. Needing two ARM cores to match a single atom core is not cool from a performance standpoint, but then again ARM cores use lot less power.Reply

As of late September, they were pushing 4000 apps with limited development availability.

4000 != 0

Yes, it's a small number, but the growth rate has been good enough to warrant optimism. Not only that, but notable windows application developers have already given their word for pushing out ARM compatible applications for this platform. Reply

100 excellent apps would trump 10 billion lousy apps. Of the gigantic app ecosystem on iOS, many of them are complete garbage and not worth even a first look, let alone paying for them. There are of course quality apps on iOS, and there are many more of them right now than on Windows RT, but 4000 is a lot of applications and if that 4000 doesn't include the garbage we see in Android and iOS (basically, 95% of free apps), that's actually a healthy starting point.

The problem is, good hardware drives hardware sales which brings the developers which brings the apps. The apps then drive more sales and you get a nice cycle going. iOS and Android have accomplished this. Windows RT has some existing apps, but there aren't any users right now so that's what they need. Still, MS + Intel + others are pushing the hardware, so in a year I think we might see a 3-way battle in the tablet space.Reply

Guess how many people I know of are dying to get that "real" office app. I hope Windows RT are flash friendly too. Even my gf is tire of her iPad 2(formerly my iPad 2), it does not do office or flash, can't download and watch any stuff that she normally does on her laptop. Guess what she's using most of the time on her iPad 2? Youtube. Because everything else is useless(to her).

Yea, iPad has thousands of apps, but most of them are point-less and useless. If Microsoft is smart, then they should never release office app to iOS or Android(even though I own many Android devices).Reply

There are already several iPad apps that let you edit/create Office docs and spreadsheets, so that's not something new. I read Excel spreadsheets and Word docs on my iPad fairly often, as email attachments. Even though I can, I've never had the desire to actually create documents - tablets are still consumption decives for most people. Reply

Exactly. Which is why predictions of the demise of the PC/laptop are very premature. That consumed content has to come from somewhere, and almost nothing is ever created on a tablet. Until tablets are useful for document/content creation they will not be replacing PCs and laptops. I, and several of my colleagues, have tried using iPads. Their small size and weight are attractive, but we all ended up giving them to our wives or kids and going back to laptops, because the iPads are next to useless for business use.

Maybe the Surface Pro with full Win8 will be usable, particularly with the "cover" that contains an integrated keyboard and turns it into a small light laptop, Time will tell. Reply

...and what do they do with that screen resolution? (Not sure of the Android device) The iPad slaps you across the face and increases the DPI so you m ight as well drop down to a 1080p screen. Resolution on tablets isn't as simple as x or yReply

Resolution isn't everything. If it was, there wouldn't be a market for high-end panel designs, since you can just use a much cheaper design with the same number of pixels. You should read the Anandtech "Inside Surface RT" article.

I'm still thinking that it should have been around $400. But it is a really premium tablet. If you want a cheaper design with cheaper components everywhere but the CPU, I'm sure there will be alternatives.Reply

1366 x 768 is perfectly fine for that screen size. The gain from going to a higher DPI isnt all that high. For the normal user more screen resolution will do nothing as all they really do is scale your interface to the same size anyway. While it would be nice to have a higher rez screen I find little point to have one on a ARM based system where the graphic power is pretty weak compared to modern desktops and laptops. Sure the iPad has many apps, but most of them are trash. Whats a good tablet without good apps that you use most. For 90% of people the web browser matters most and iOS falls on its ass when it comes to a decent web browser. Windows 8 makes iOS feel like a kids toy.

This is everyone's first reaction, but it shouldn't be if you've been paying attention. We've all known since the announcement that Surface is meant to be a showpiece and a benchmark to set the bar high as the premium Windows 8 tablet. They made a big deal about the molded magnesium case and followed Apple by securing agreements for a steady supply of the raw material before production. MS made it crystal clear it was always meant to be a direct competitor to the iPad, not a competitor to cheap tabs -- that's the job of MS's partners. Microsoft would seriously have shot themselves in the foot if they had released a very price aggressive tablet because all their partners would have just left.Reply

Furthermore, by selling it only in the MS stores, it's clear they're leaving the big box retail space open for their partners to fill with bargain and mid priced tablets. This tablet is a showpiece, it will not and was never meant to dominate the market.Reply

As the RT cannot run x86 apps I assumed that they were going to sell it for cheap (~$3-400) in order to get a foothold on the market and get people to start purchasing metro apps in the store. But $500 for something that has no real desktop and cannot run old applications is a bit of a shock to the system.

3 years ago I purchased a netbook which can do more than this new tablet, and it only cost me $280. Yes, the RT gets better battery, has a better screen, and looks a little better (though not much better), but it is crippled with ARM and is not worth the extra $220 for looks and battery! This is not progress!Reply

If it were all about cost and capabilities, then netbooks should be flying off of store shelves even now. They aren't. And mostly because while they had a lot of capabilities, the performance of such machines was terrible.

You should get what you pay for, but in this you do not. For $500 you can get a full-blown laptop that will run traditional x86 applications, and will blow this out of the water when it comes to the screen, CPU, storage, and even looks, and when you get in the $700 range then you are talking about some very nice devices that these really cannot touch.

Apple can sell their tablets for high prices because they are apple. they are viewed as the ones who have 'done it right', and were the first to the market with an apparently compelling product. MS is not such a status symbol. Windows users are made up of 4 main groups: Business users (who will not touch this with a 10' pole), budget users (who cannot afford this, or what the most !/$), gamers (whose games will not run on this), and students who may be interested but will have a lot of other options in iOS and Android devices.

At $500 this is being played up as an iPad competitor, and they are not going to win them over because iPad users want iPads because they are iPads, not because they are the only or best option available. I just really wonder what MS is thinking sometimes.Reply

If MS really wanted to build a bridge between the glut of productivity-minded Windows users and the casual tablet space, they could've offered the 64GB Touch Cover version for $599.

A hundred dollars sounds petty, but the comfortable amount of storage and keyboard at that price would've cut a clear line between the $500 iPad competitor and the slightly more expensive Windows laptop replacement.

As it stands now, some users might lust for a $600 tablet with expanded storage (perhaps without the keyboard attachment). I can't imagine why MS would want to put some users in that position. Reply

I think the pricing of this just shows that the real ipad contenders are the ultrabook/tablet hybrids. Surface price it is far too high for the price, i would rather spend another $200 and get a ThinkPad Twist.

I wonder if there is any cross compiler for windows RT to pro (to increase the number of apps quickly) in the works that would make sence of this pricing line, or a way to simplify the integration of apps to these RT tablets.Reply

All RT apps run on Win8 if the developer chooses to. And porting them to WinPhone 8 is supposed to be very easy. That is the real strength of Microsoft's approach. Imagine having an iPad app that also runs on OS X with zero code changes.

If sales are good this season, devs are going to jump all over Windows 8 and the store will fill up fast.Reply

I will look into it, not a .net dev myself. But if you say is right it is infact a very good reason to stick with windows 8, but for me only the PRO version, as I need full office and dev tools on it to be useful.Reply

You can already run C# code on iOS or Android since years back (Mono).

You could in theory but not really practiced have run much of the WinPhone 7.X code in Silverlight on Windows.

The real advantage of a new Windows platform is native apps, i.e. C++/C. I.e. you can actually port games to the platform without completely rewriting the game engines, middleware, game logic etc.Reply

They are trying to position this as a high-end product that is more capable than Android or iOS (whether that's true remains to be seen). The base price matches the iPad's base price. So I actually think it's fine.

But I think that this confirms that the x86 version will be more expensive, and that the average consumer - the one that does not read AnandTech - will be VERY confused as to which to buy. Microsoft is really delivering a confusing message: No matter what you buy, you feel like you made sacrifices and you can never be 100% satisfied.Reply

Well the developers have already made 250,000+ applications for the iPad while the Surface RT will have 4,000 at best.

Out of the gate it'll be an order of magnitude *less* capable than and iPad simply because just about anything you can imagine already exists as an iPad app, including full touch-enabled office suites.Reply

What kind of performance differences are we expecting between the T3+RT versions and the IVB+8 versions?

Hopefully Microsoft collapses and standardizes some of these options though, I hate the idea of being in peripheral hell with all of these minor configuration changes that result in huge price differences.

Also definitely needs an SD slot for expandable storage, but otherwise I'm pretty impressed. Would definitely buy this over an Ultrabook, iPad, or Androidtab at this point, so the pricing makes sense.Reply

There's no way that keyboard is worth a $100 ($120 for colors) premium. It should have been included in the base price with your choice of colors. That might have justified the too high $500 price tag.

The Touch/Type Cover *is* a good idea and a differentiator. But not if it's sold seperately.

The screen resolution and price are non-starters for me. And I really wanted to jump on board, too.

So will several million others. And many who was considering Android 10 inch devices will quickly make their purchase there laughing when they see users trying multple times to gesture on Surface before the action actually registers on that tablet. Crude for sure and Metro looks really horrible for such a big screen. Very refined tablets like ICS and iPads are just the ones thus Surface needs to compete with. If they think they wanted to compete with netbooks, then price points are even lower!. Double fail for RT. But Pro will do well mainly because it is the only choice for legacy X86 users to upgrade.Reply

I've got Win 8 RC on an Acer W501. Works fine. It is a shame that Microsoft is so far behind the ball it can't beat the responsiveness of year old tech using cutting edge technologies. I also find it nice that you can review a device before it is released. Because that's why we all read Anandtech for. Quick and lacking reviews.

I'll be the first to say I am not as lucky as you and have not played with this tablet. The all the other tech journos I follow who said it looked classy didn't get to touch it so I'm guessing they are all wrong.

I'm also glad to see that Microsoft has seen the light and stopped licencing their software. Why should other companies get to proffit from Microsoft when Microsoft invested so much money into making Windows 8? I do find it weird that Microsoft is releasing Windows 8 three months before the tabet. What will we run it on? an iPad?

People commenting on the high prices of the Surface are missing the point. While it is true that in terms of productivity this is of a very poor value, this product however is aimed at a specific consumer market, and more specifically the iPad market. With the Surface priced so close to the iPad, yet it delivers MS Office and thus more productivity, it is no longer just a 'cool toy'.Reply

1. When will get a Microsoft store here in the Triangle?2. People will not buy something completely new without touching it, so they need to get some out there3. I do like having a USB port (loved the "how they designed" on the other article) - can I plug in a 32GB USB key to go to 64GB

I do agree that $499 is high, but it is $100 less than iPad 3 with 32GB.

However, with that being said, will look at one of the new Lenovo offerings, or a Nexus 7 (the new 32GB ones when they come out). Lenovo's equivalent tablet is a little more expensive, but it has Atom inside, and runs regular Windows.Reply

I was waiting eagerly for this, but the pricing is too high for me. No doubt MS has its reasons, but to pay this much for.... well, what? It's not running standard Windows 8, so what exactly is it running and what is it for?

If I don't need the keyboard, I might was well get an iPad. If I DO need a decent keyboard, it's because I'm going to be using Office in a serious way, but then I might as well buy a proper laptop/ultrabook that runs real Windows 8. Why take on the risk and headache of working out just how compromised this experience is going to be with this... thing, at this price?Reply